Which two individuals co-discovered the wreck of the RMS ‘Titanic’?

In 1985, Robert Ballard (born 1942), a retired American Navy officer and Jean-Louis Michel (born 1945), a French oceanographer and engineer, led an expedition that found the wreck of the HMS ‘Titanic’. It had split in two and disintegrated at a depth of 12,415 feet (2,069.2 fathoms: 2,784 meters).

Ballard also had been a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography.Ballard attributes his career interest to three key factors: first, watching the Disney adaptation of the 1870 Jules Verne novel ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, second, living by the ocean in San Diego, California and third, his fascination with the groundbreaking expeditions of the bathyscaphe ‘Trieste’, a free-diving self-propelled deep-sea submersible.

Ballard invited a French research team, led by Michel to join his expedition.

Michel had discovered subsea intervention in 1969 with the French Navy as an officer at the ‘Groupe des Bathyscapes’ (Bathyscapes Group).

The expedition used Ballard’s newly engineered unmanned submersible ‘Argo’ to locate the sunken ship. It could explore wider areas, dive deeper, stay underwater for weeks and deliver crisp and clear pictures of what it found.

The RMS ‘Titanic’ was a British passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from SouthHampton in route to New York City.